Editor |
Fleming, James Dougal |
Year |
2011 |
Publisher |
Farnham: Ashgate |
ISBN |
9780754668411 |
Number of pages |
228 |
Keywords |
|
- Leah Knight on BSLS website (2012):
“This collection aims to provoke a variety
of eponymous discoveries and inventions about meanings held by the book’s keywords
in the early modern world. In so doing it raises questions not only about the salience
of these concepts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but about the recent
scholarly rhetorical reorientation favouring the idea of invention in place of the
outmoded trope of discovery—a rhetorical shift characterized by Fleming, in a signature
piece of provocation, as “rebranding.” With its origins in a panel at the 2008 Renaissance
Society of America meeting, the collection is an apt fit for Ashgate’s now decade-old
series on the Literary and Scientific Cultures of EarlyModernity, where Fleming’s
earlier work on Milton’s hermeneutics of secrecy also found a home. The focus of this
collection expands the terms of his first book in order to put his expertise to use
in shepherding into being eleven essays, each in its own way offering evidence related
to Fleming’s founding hypothesis.
Fleming’s framing thought, to which the
essays under its rubric offer varying degrees of attention and substantiation, is
that discovery itself needed to be invented in this period. That is, discovery was
not valued before New World conquest; such conquest, instead, endowed discovery with
value as a method for obtaining power (8). In support of this boldly counter-intuitive
arrangement of chickens and eggs, Fleming rapidly tours the dilapidated landscape
of the “Age of Discovery,” in which new worlds, earthly and celestial, were populated
by newly re-read texts (through humanism), new scriptural meanings (through Protestantism),
and new sense experiences (through science). The introduction thus aptly starts at
these very beginnings, for the beginner, while the editor’s afterword forcefully and
vividly continues to advance his argument about the invention of discovery only to
end by turning it, inevitably, back upon both his and all other attempts to understand
the world. The self-questioning epistemological attitude in which the book comes to
rest does not, strange to say, subtract from the confidence with which that scepticism
is expressed. Fleming has a talent for nearly paradoxical yet intriguingly plausible,
and sometimes memorably pithy, formulations; yet his aim to unpack knowledge-making
rhetoric and rationales occasionally seems compromised by a fondness for antithesis
and the quick chiasmic twist.
Fortune-cookie-length assessments will do
no justice to the diversity of essays Fleming has shaped in collaboration with their
authors. Nonetheless: Piers Brown persuasively identifies commonplaces of the early
modern travel narrative—especially positive characterizations of wandering, error,
and accidental finds—as governing epistemological metaphors in the astronomy of Kepler
and (less substantially) Galileo. Steven Matthews elegantly locates the roots of Bacon’s
familiar inductive process of elimination in an unexpected theological source, the
via negativa of the Neo-Platonic Pseudo-Dionsysius. Michael Booth, whose essay begins
with a lucid addendum to Fleming’s introduction, argues that Thomas Hariot’s encounters
with Algonquin linguistics and economics resonated with (if they did not yield) his
algebraic innovations; as technical as it is imaginative, the essay is itself an example
of the “conceptual blending” it posits and lauds in Hariot’s work. Fleming contributes
an extremely and perhaps excessively dense analysis of the fates of the scholastic
category of the occult, or the categorically unintelligible, when it met early-modern
Neoplatonic and Paracelsian esotericisms. One factual error (Levinus Lemnius lived
in the early-sixteenth century, not the late seventeenth; the confusion might derive
from the 1658 date on the English translation of his work cited here) undermines an
otherwise formidable fortress of erudition. Anthony Russell’s study of self-reflexive
creativity deriving from Ficino connects natural magic with Donne’s poetics in the
Anniversaries; the essay feels somewhat tangentially related to the collection’s main
concerns, but stands on its own merits. Pietro Omodeo argues, by closely reading the
astronomy of Kepler, Bruno, and the less well-known Benedetti, that no single standard
Copernicanism united them. Jacqueline Wernimont reads recent “possible worlds” theory
back into The World Descartes wrote (but did not publish), a fabulous alternate reality
invented as a site for discovery, in which possibility itself was the enabling condition
of inquiry and knowledge. Ryan Netzley detects a conflation of discovery and invention
behind the numbers, numerological and chronological, that structure and give meaning
to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Travis DeCook explores a rejection of discovery, motivated
by a commitment to ecclesiastical moderation, in Thomas Fuller’s antiquarian work.
Louise Denmead’s treatment of the dramatic device of the ‘bed-trick’ similarly explores
the rejection of discovery through a kind of willed forgetting (in this case, of the
blackness of a concealed substitute lover). Vincent Masse compiles examples in early
French printed books of a new selling point: not comprehensiveness, or accuracy, but
novelty itself.
As an interdisciplinary contribution to the historiography
of hermeneutics and knowledge-making practices, The Invention of Discovery participates
vigorously through closely argued and carefully edited essays in the ongoing renovation
of our understanding of early modern ways of understanding, a task that Fleming calls
us to set at the centre of all cultural work. Given the commitment to interdisciplinarity
required to fulfill this demand, it is interesting to note who heeded his call here:
eight of the eleven contributors are specialists in early modern English literature.
What might this mean for the Age of Interdisciplinarity?”
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it
has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself
invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented,
through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of
modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology
to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's
generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production.
They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority
that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. "The Invention of Discovery,
1500-1700" is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive
trope for modern knowledge.